The Pitchfork Effect

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The Pitchfork Effect

Kevin Drew is clearly in his element. It's a Wednesday in June, and the stylishly scruffy frontman of the band Broken Social Scene is surrounded by a few hundred fans who traveled to a small club at the outermost edge of Brooklyn to see the group play an unannounced show. Sympathetic and pleasantly soused, the crowd laughs knowingly when Drew apologizes for a somewhat sloppy rendition of "Fire Eye'd Boy." "It's a casual set tonight, folks," he says. Everyone falls silent when he adds, "It's gonna be a whole lot tighter tomorrow night for the Letterman show."

By the humble standards of indie rock, Broken Social Scene – a Toronto collective with a fluctuating lineup of more than a dozen members that includes two trumpet players and a trombonist – has made it. The group's albums have sold more than 275,000 copies in North America, and after appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman the band will go on to play the huge Lollapalooza festival in Chicago. What's more impressive about this success is that Broken Social Scene creates unhurried, ethereal music that has never been played on a Clear Channel radio station, cannot provide the soundtrack to a TRL video, and will probably never land it on the cover of Rolling Stone.

It's hard to pinpoint a single factor responsible for Broken Social Scene's rise. The band's talent has certainly helped, as has a prolonged slump in major-label rock that has sent frustrated listeners scrambling for anything new and nonconformist. But the group also owes a lot to a backhanded rave from an online music fanzine called Pitchfork.

Ryan Schreiber, the site's editor in chief, reviewed Broken Social Scene's US debut album, You Forgot It in People, in 2003. He began by lamenting the fact that he was receiving more promotional CDs than he could possibly write about or even listen to, and he acknowledged that he had plucked this record from the slush pile at random. He chastised the group for its gloomy packaging and liner notes ("How could they not be the most unimaginative, bleak, whiny emo bastards in the whole pile?"). Then he conceded that he'd been listening to the record obsessively for months. It "explodes," he wrote, "with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop." Schreiber awarded it a score of 9.2 points out of a possible 10. An indie rock star was born.

"That's when the phone calls started coming in," Drew says. "The next tour we went on, we suddenly found ourselves selling out venues. Everyone was coming up to us, saying, 'We heard about you from Pitchfork.' It basically opened the door for us. It gave us an audience."

Pitchfork, meanwhile, was becoming famous in its own right. As Schreiber and his tiny staff built a repository of defiantly passionate and frustratingly capricious reviews, they were insinuating themselves into the grand tradition of rock criticism, joining the ranks of imperious and opinionated writers who could, with a single phrase, turn readers on to an exciting new performer (recall Jon Landau's 1974 pronouncement in the Real Paper: "I saw rock & roll's future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen") or compel them to reassess the work of an established master (see Greil Marcus' take on Bob Dylan's album Self Portrait: "What is this shit?"). Pitchfork has appropriated the aura of integrity and authenticity that made such pronouncements credible, even definitive, to fans.

Though the music industry has seen drastic changes in recent years, what has remained constant is the fact that most listeners still find their music with the assistance of a filter: a reliable source that sifts through millions of tracks to help them choose what they do (and don't) want to hear. The filters we traditionally depended on – music magazines, radio stations, music video channels, even the recommendations of a trusted record store clerk – have diminished in influence enough to give a player like Pitchfork room to operate. Pitchfork is a small site: The traffic it draws is too tiny to be measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. But like the indie bands that are its lifeblood, Pitchfork has found its own way to thrive in an industry that is slowly being niched to death: It influences those who influence others.

I should probably mention that Pitchfork also helped put me out of a job. From 2002 until just recently, I was an editor at Spin, a magazine that was itself once positioned as a much-needed substitute for the entrenched rock journalism establishment. Spin's influence peaked in the early '90s, when alt-rock acts like Nirvana started going multiplatinum. But as that scene receded, the magazine struggled to find its identity: In one incarnation, it would sing the praises of nü-metalheads like Korn and Limp Bizkit; in the next, it would pin its hopes on garage-rock revivalists like the Strokes and the White Stripes. As Pitchfork's influence grew, we consulted the site as both a resource and a measuring stick – if it was lavishing attention on a new band, we at least had to ask ourselves why we weren't doing the same: By then, our value as a trustworthy and consistent filter had waned.

The trouble we had at Spin was that although there were still new and emerging indie-rock acts worth getting excited about, none would ever be big enough to sell a magazine that had to reach half a million consumers every month just to stay alive. But Pitchfork thrives in this new climate – it took the model and the voice of a print publication to the Internet, where it could cultivate a small but influential readership and write about music in any form and at any length it wanted. It also rediscovered that the secret to tastemaking is taste: Through the bands that it chose to focus on and the artists it ignored – and, yes, its utterly unscientific but geekily precise 10-point album-rating scale – the site was speaking directly to listeners no longer served by traditional media outlets.

At any given moment, Pitchfork's homepage provides an instantaneous read on a broad swath of pop-music happenings, with band interviews, tour dates, and a frequently updated news feed. But what immediately catches a reader's eye is the profusion of adjectives and adverbs that don't always mean exactly what they say but are passionately trying to say something: The debut CD from the Brooklyn trio Au Revoir Simone is described as "musically fanciful and lyrically Pollyannaish," while the latest release from the avant-garde band TV on the Radio, we are told, has "abstract and electronic textures," and a new album from the British group Keane is excoriated for its "portentous clichés."

Even if Pitchfork's exhaustive and in-depth reviews can be overwrought and hard to understand at times, the site's genuine enthusiasm is infectious. It treats the unheralded Pittsburgh cut-and-paste artist Girl Talk as importantly as old-guard arena-rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers. "The priorities of the mainstream media are to give the audience what they believe they want," says Matthew Perpetua, who writes about indie rock at Fluxblog.org. "Pitchfork goes for things that are not obvious, or aren't on the radar at all. They write about things simply because they're interested in them."

The boldness of the Web site stands in stark contrast to the modesty of its physical offices, located in Chicago's old industrial Logan Square neighborhood, in an art deco-style building. A Post-it note that reads "Pitchfork Media, 5E" is stuck to the directory. One flight up, the six full-time staff members, along with a rotating roster of part-timers and interns, tap away at laptops in four small adjoining rooms, surrounded by piles of CDs and walls decorated with promo posters for bands like M83 and Sigur Rós. They've nicknamed their supply closet Burger Town because it sits above an aromatic street-level diner. When I worked at Spin, most editors had their own offices – at Pitchfork, they all share the same phone line.

Schreiber comes to work dressed in jeans and thrift store T-shirts; a few silver strands in his scraggly brown beard are the only outward sign that he is really 30 years old. He grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs, where he spent his high school years steeped in indie rock – seminal acts like Fugazi, Jawbox, and Guided by Voices – on alternative and college radio stations. But he was also interested in the fanzine culture that was springing up around this emerging music scene. "All my friends were doing Xeroxed zines, and some small local papers were able to get interviews with artists that I really liked," he says between swigs from a can of Diet Dr Pepper. "I thought, 'It can't really be that difficult if these guys are doing it. Why them and not me?'"

In 1996, turning to the then-nascent medium of the Internet, Schreiber launched his own online music publication, using an unreliable Mac with a dialup connection. He named his site after a tattoo that Al Pacino sports in Scarface: a pitchfork that supposedly marked him as an assassin in the Cuban underworld. "It just seemed concise and easy to say," Schreiber says, "and it had these evilish overtones."

Schreiber moved to Chicago in 1999. Soon after, Pitchfork began to amass a following for the sheer volume of content it offered its readership (these days it posts some 100 new record reviews a month at 400 to 600 words a pop) and for its unorthodox and highly stylized writing: an enthusiastic appreciation for a rerelease of Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted handwritten on yellow legal paper, or an assessment of Thee Headcoats' Headcoats Down! delivered as a dialog between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. But it also developed a reputation as the Tony Montana of music criticism – a kind of cultural assassin, stirring up electronic waves whenever it affixed its dreaded, bottom-of-the-barrel 0.0 rating to such seemingly untouchable targets as Sonic Youth and the Flaming Lips.

As the site cranked out hundreds of critiques of the artists making indie rock, the mainstream music media was paying less and less attention to them. MTV became better known as a purveyor of reality-TV programming than a broadcaster of music videos. Rolling Stone chased movie stars and teen-pop performers for its covers and slashed away at the length of the average review – most are now a paragraph, and featured reviews are just four or five times that long. A path had been cleared for Pitchfork to earn the trust and deference of a rock-starved readership desperate for a more comprehensive and reliable filter.

BY 2001, Schreiber believed the audience for Pitchfork had peaked. "It was like, how many more Yo La Tengo fans could there possibly be?" he says. But the site's traffic quintupled over the next five years, from a modest 30,000 visits a day to a slightly less-modest 150,000. For the relatively tiny indie-rock audience, however, Pitchfork opinions had an impact far out of proportion to its middling traffic stats.

If Pitchfork's ascent has surprised staff members, it has completely baffled some veterans of the Internet gold rush. David Hyman spent those years trying to build the Web sites Addicted to Noise and, later, SonicNet into one-stop destinations for music news, only to see them sold off to MTV Networks and shut down after the dotcom bubble burst. Today he's no fan of the Chicago upstart. "I get the sense that a lot of their writers have never written before," says Hyman, who's now chief executive of the music-themed networking site Mog. "You used to have to go to journalism school to have credibility."

That complaint would seem to be Pitchfork's strongest selling point: By opening its pages to contributors who were willing to sacrifice competitive wages for a chance to express themselves authentically, the site undercut the authority of its print-based rivals.

Chris Dahlen, a Pitchfork contributing writer and an IT worker who resides in New Hampshire, is a good example. If he hadn't found Pitchfork after college, his career as a writer might have ended at his school paper. "I didn't know anyone at the local alt-weekly, so I just didn't write for several years," he says.

Dahlen is the author of one of Pitchfork's most memorable – and notorious – reviews. In a September 2004 write-up of Travistan, the solo debut of Travis Morrison (former frontman of the Pitchfork-approved art-punk group the Dismemberment Plan), Dahlen gave the album a score of 0.0, declaring that it "fails so bizarrely that it's hard to guess what Morrison wanted to accomplish in the first place."

According to Josh Rosenfeld, the cofounder of Barsuk Records (which released Travistan), the effects of Dahlen's review were immediate and disastrous. Several college radio stations that had initially been enthusiastic said they wouldn't play it. "One indie record store even said that they wouldn't carry it because of the Pitchfork review," Rosenfeld says. "Not because they heard it – because of the review."

Dahlen says the review wasn't intended as a display of Pitchfork's might or an attempt to take a once-beloved musician down a peg or two. "It really was me driving home from Pennsylvania for eight hours," he says, "listening to this again and again, just sitting there like, 'This is relentlessly bad.'"

Two years after the furor ignited by the Travistan write-up, the site has become more careful about doling out such brutal reviews, says Pitchfork's managing editor, Scott Plagenhoef. When Pitchfork reviewers took on Morrison, he says, they were no longer "little guys on the Internet throwing rocks at big artists" – they were picking on one of their own. Though Plagenhoef says the site has to be more cautious about the power it wields, he still downplays Pitchfork's ability to make or break new bands. "We probably accelerate the process," he concedes. "But people will like what they're going to like regardless of how they found out about it."

He isn't the only one who's skeptical about the idea of a "Pitchfork effect." So are some of the bands that have received raves from the site. "Putting too much weight in somebody else's opinion of a piece of art, that is a dangerous thing," says Richard Reed Parry, a musician for Arcade Fire, whose album Funeral received a rapturous 9.7 rating from the site. "It's just a reaction. It's the last piece of the cultural puzzle, not the most important part."

Still, it isn't hard to find evidence of the impact that Pitchfork has on music journalism. In the record-review formula used by the aggregator site Metacritic.com, which calculates a weighted score drawn from nearly 50 different publications, a review from Pitchfork is given as much weight as a review from Rolling Stone.

It's also possible to see Pitchfork's influence reflected in the ambitions of larger media companies that once again see the potential in connecting listeners to new music online, using content generated by name-brand critics. There's eMusic, a subscription-based service that combines a massive library of DRM-free independent music with recommendations and critiques from about 150 well-known writers, including MTV News correspondent Kurt Loder. "On an editorial level, I tend to think we're the 800-pound gorilla," says eMusic editor in chief Michael Azerrad.

And MTV Networks recently beta-launched Urge, which also offers millions of licensed tracks plus editorial content from its own pool of some 25 writers and bloggers. Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks' music group, doesn't consider Urge a challenge to Pitchfork, but he acknowledges, "When you have trusted names – trusted as music experts – as well as your peer group and like-minded music freaks around you, that will be such a comforting environment that you might not go to many other places to get your music."

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Pitchfork is being nibbled at by tiny MP3 blogs that are so below the radar that they can directly link readers to all the tracks they write about without worrying as much about music clearance issues. Though none of these diary-like blogs may ever have enough traffic to challenge Pitchfork, there may come a day when every niche audience has a blogger that speaks directly to it. "The only way we would be in trouble," says Jason Dietz, music editor at Metacritic.com, "is if there's so many people posting their opinions on the Web that people totally stopped caring about what professional critics have to say. Which may have already happened."

If Pitchfork should somehow lose its dedicated following, Schreiber says he's prepared to go back to the scrappy, DIY roots that first spawned the site. In fact, it almost sounds as if he's spoiling for the opportunity. "We survived for years on a very, very small readership and virtually no budget," he says. "It's still something that I could do independently, even if I didn't have the means to support a staff."

Dave itzkoff is a New York City-based freelance writer.credit Peter YangThe band Broken Social Scene owes some of its success to a rave review on Pitchfork.credit Peter YangRyan Schreiber started Pitchfork on a Mac and a dialup connection 10 years ago.